Stuff

ICM have released a new constituency poll of Sheffield Hallam, conducted for the Guardian. It shows Nick Clegg holding on to his seat by a margin of seven points over Labour when respondents are asked a voting intention question that includes the names of the candidates standing. Full details are here. As regular readers will recall, previous polling of the seat has shown a much tighter race with Lord Ashcroft’s last poll in Hallam showing Labour ahead by one.

So which poll is correct? Is Nick Clegg likely to hold his seat? The bottom line is while that this piece of evidence does make it look a little more likely that Clegg might hold on, we can’t really be confident what the true position is. The ICM poll had a sample size of 500, the Ashcroft poll had a sample size of 1000. Hence it could well be that there isn’t any difference at all between the polls, that it’s just normal sample variation around a small Lib Dem lead. Its also possible that there has been movement towards Clegg in the days between the two polls as the election looms and people consider a tactical vote.

However a lot has been made of the fact that while both polls had an effort to take account of people’s personal and tactical voting behaviour in their own constituency, they did so in different ways – Ashcroft asks a two stage question, asking people their national preference and then how they will vote thinking about the candidates and parties in their own constituency; ICM asked people the voting intention question including the names of the candidates standing in Sheffield Hallam. Both methods seem to have given a boost to the Lib Dems compared to a generic question, given sample variation and timing we can’t even be certain one did had more impact than the other, let alone which one is more accurate.

One can very easily make a case for one or the other method (Chris Hanretty has a good go here) but really that’s only theorising, we can’t know which way is better unless you test it against some actual elections, and at previous elections constituency polling has been a rare commodity.

In the meantime, Sheffield Hallam remains an interesting race. Normally the idea of party leaders losing seats is regularly drummed up but incredibly unlikely to happen. This time, while my personal expectation is that Clegg will hold on and this poll will probably end up about right, there is a least a non-zero possibility of him being ousted. We shall see.

Surely the attention given to the seat could make an upset MORE likely as those who would usually not bother to go out and vote think it would be worth upsetting the apple-cart – students may just set their alarms and make sure they vote rather than forget.

If I was NC relying on Tory votes then I wouldn’t be at all confident.

The devil, as they say, is in the detail of the ICM poll. Whilst the Guardian has majored on the Tories saving Nick Clegg, in fact even Labour are -1% once the candidates are named, as are the Greens and even UKIP. No wonder second guessing election results and trends remains endlessly fascinating!

My thoughts as well. On Sunday before election the G reported an opinion poll in Michael Portillo`s which suggested he hasd only a 7% lead in what was a we seat. Laboiur activists then poured into constituency in last few days and poor Michael lost to Stephen Twigg on election day. Given todays endorsement by a certain celeb popular younger people, I just wonder whether this might be real close result?

I loathe UKIP, but if they do get a 12/13% vote share it will be a disgrace if they don’t get a single seat (Carswell excepted). It will be a bigger injustice than Lib/SPD’s return in 1983. 12/13% would be about 3-4 million votes, would it not? Surely no-one can be comfortable with that.

The trajectory from the Ashcroft polls where… the lead went from 2% to 1%? That’s margin-of-error stuff.

We have a range of polls predicting everything from a 10-point lead for Coppard to a 7-point lead for Clegg. We won’t know which is right until the night, although my own suspicion is that it will be close, with one or the other of them squeaking a win of a percentage point or two rather than five or ten.

I seem to recall reading over the weekend – possibly on one of the Guardian’s live-blogs – that the Party political preferences – i.e. of voters supporting those political parties – for the newest baby Cambridge were as follows:

Conservative: Alice

Labour: Charlotte

Lib Dem: [I honestly can’t remember]

UKIP: Victoria

As such, have Kate and Wills signalled to the nation their political preference?

[mashes tinfoil on head]

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On a more serious note, what effect do people on this thread think Brand’s endorsement will have on the 18 – 24 demographic’s voting intentions – assuming they registered in time.

“Coupled with the trajectory of the Ashcroft polls, this has more or less nailed on that Clegg will hold his seat.”

A touch premature, perchance? Given that all polls except February’s Survation have had results within MoE? And as Barnaby says, they didn’t (and technically couldn’t) sample the 4,200 students in Endcliffe and Ranmoor?

NOPE do not think ukip will overtake libdems – sadly, as no fan of Ukip. I think they will do a little better than yougov suggest :(. Also think Clegg will hold his seat but will be close and not a good night generally for libdems generally.

Quite simple: If you do a daily random poll of all of Britain (maybe except Northern Ireland, where the principle: “who cares?” applies…), especially when you do a blind random one, you don’t know beforehand which consituency the respondent actually lives in.

In addition to that, if your sample size is, say, 1,000 respondents all across Britain, with more than 600 constituencies you would get somewhere in between 1 and 2 respondents per consiituency, which is anything but representative and definetly nothing to build a mathematical/statistical prediction model on…

In other words: it wouldn’t make any sense at all for any other than VERY specific constituency polls (like the Sheffield Hallam ones).

Of course the problem is that if you don’t include the question after the candidates in your set of questions, for a prediction of the SEATS (not the %s of votes) you have to find a way to “house effect” this back into your calculus.

Which is why polling in the UK when working to predict a #of seats usually uses the national swing in combination with incumbency bonuses.

Fair point, but I’m inclined to trust ICM here, simply because I suspect that hostility to Miliband from Tory voters will motivate them to set aside any dislike of Clegg. So ICM’s poll is consistent with that hypothesis.

But you’re right, it could easily go the other way. As others have said, maybe Brand’s endorsement will prompt students to flood the polling stations.